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Dr
Rachel
Willie

Dr
Rachel
Willie

Biography

My research covers seventeenth century literary history and culture. My first book, "Staging the Revolution: drama, reinvention and history, 1647-72" (shortlisted for the University English Early Career Book Prize, 2016) offers a reappraisal of drama, both in terms of live performances and performances on the paper stage. My book argues that, far from 1660 marking a watershed moment as is often asserted in the texts transmitted in the Restoration and assumed to be true by later critics, late seventeenth-century England was concerned with the continuing legacies of recent history and this is revealed in literature printed and disseminated in the period. While researching this book, I became intrigued by the number of anonymous scurrilous pamphlets ‘by the man in the moon’ and I have begun a wider study on ‘long seventeenth-century’ responses to the moon as an embodied and as a philosophical construct. With Kevin Killeen and Helen Smith, both based at the University of York, I co-edited "The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700" (winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize in Reference Works, 2016). More recently, my research has broadened to consider emotions and the senses by drawing from my interests in material cultures and the relationship between literature and the epistemologies that underpin politics, religion and natural philosophy; this is supported by considering the relationship between literature and history. I have ongoing interests in early modern drama, music, cheap print, publicness, the early modern soundscape, history and cultural history, and the history of ideas.

Before joining LJMU in 2016, I taught at Bangor University, the University of Manchester and the University of York. I have taught extensively across all periods of English literary history and interdisciplinary modules on the relationship between music and text. My teaching is fundamentally dialogic, encouraging students to explore ideas through discussion and analysis as a way to extend and stimulate critical thinking. I would be happy to receive proposals for postgraduate research on early modern literature and culture, especially on early modern drama; early modern prose; seventeenth century political thought; early modern science and religion; performance and the paper stage; adaptation; myth and cultural memory; writing history; materialities.

Degrees

University of York, United Kingdom, PhD in EnglishKing's College London, United Kingdom, MA in EnglishUniversity of Roehampton, United Kingdom, BA (hons) in English Literature and Music

Engagement & Impact

‘Voices, Books and Music’s Effects’ panel, Early Modern Global Soundscapes’, University of York, Chair and Respondent 25/01/2019

‘Rogues, Roundheads and Royalist Satire: Singing the Restoration’, Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies Research Seminar (invited speaker), University of York, Oral presentation 24/01/2019

Early Modern Sermons: Performances and Afterlives, closing roundtable discussion, Early Modern English Preaching c.1500-c.1700, University of Sheffield, Roundtable 02/11/2018

‘“I found then by this experience that which no Philosopher ever dreamed of”: Knowledge, Doubt and the Moon’, Plague, Pastors and Lunatics: Religion and the Circulation of Knowledge panel, Society for Renaissance Studies 8th Biennial Conference, University of Sheffield, Oral presentation 03/07/2018

‘“These be the humours that content me best”: time and [e]motion in John Lyly’s "The Woman in the Moon"’,, Time and Emotion Seminar, Shakespeare Association of America 46th Annual Conference, Los Angeles, Oral presentation 28/03/2018

Rumps, Songs and Revelry: the Stuart Restoration and Arbitrary Period Boundaries, CUSO Workshop: Restoration and the Long Eighteenth Century: Concept and Metaphor (Invited Speaker), University of Geneva, Switzerland, Oral presentation 04/11/2017

‘he must be a Prelate as the Beast is’: Pope Laud, Remembering the Reformation, University of Cambridge, Oral presentation 07/09/2017

‘he must be a Prelate as the Beast is’: Anti-Laudian Revelation, English Research Seminar (invited speaker), LJMU, Oral presentation 07/03/2017

”Were not their eares to them, as pretious as your nostrils can be to you”: Sensing Trust, Sensing Authority, Trust and Risk in Literature network meeting (invited speaker), University of Yamanshi, Kofu, Japan, Oral presentation

‘“this reading of books is a pernicious thing”: Journeys of the Mind in The Emperor of the Moon (1687), Society for Renaissance Studies 6th Biennial Conference, University of Southampton, Oral presentation

CUSO Workshop: Restoration and the Long Eighteenth Century: Concept and Metaphor, University of Geneva, Switzerland, Lecture and the facilitating of a seminar mainly for PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers as part of a workshop organised under the auspices of the Conference Universitaire de Suisse Occidentale (CUSO) network of Swiss Universities.

Research Grants Awarded:

Arts and Humanities Research Council, Soundscapes in the Early Modern World, Emilie Murphy, University of York, Grant value (£): 45,474, Duration of research project: 19 Months